parenting

Link tromped with me into the Junior High building. It is a familiar place to me, because Kiki has been attending there for three years. For Link, the building was new. It represented a new and exciting chapter in his life. He took his map and navigated us around the school for a bit. We located the lunch room and the math rooms before the novelty wore off and he was ready to go home. At that point we’d already seen most of what he cares about. I worry for Link attending junior high, and I am excited. I love having the ability to select his classes separately. We can put him into advanced Math and resource English. He signed up for Clarinet. I don’t expect him to like it any better than Kiki did, but I think he will do better with it. He is better at practicing than she was at the same age.

Kiki flopped across my bed and thrust a hand full of papers in my general direction. It was the registration papers for high school. I sat with her and we combed through the class listings, trying to figure out what would be the best fit for her. Next year’s course load will be heavy. We have it on good authority that the Chemistry teacher believes in lots of homework. She’s also taking three honors classes (English, History, & Art.) The Honors classes will expect more from her, but I think she will enjoy them more because the other students will also be focused rather than just filling out graduation credits. The most startling realization for me was all the information on Driver’s Ed. Kiki will be fifteen in May. At that point she will be eligible for a Driver’s Permit. We’ve talked it over and the best fit for us all is for her to take Driver’s Ed next summer, so we have a brief reprieve. It still feels really soon.

I can feel the shifts. Both Kiki and Link are looking forward, selecting classes, making plans. They are both enthusiastic and optimistic. Picking new classes was always one of my favorite parts of school. The possibilities lay right in front of me and the challenges were only theoretical. In the not too far future, Kiki and Link will both reach a day when they are feeling trepidation for things to come. Next Fall will bring days when they feel overwhelmed and buried. The road ahead of us is long. We are going to get tired. But I am excited for them as they contemplate what is coming. We are all standing at the beginning of a path, wriggling our toes inside our shoes, anticipating the first steps.

Children go through regular developmental stages where they are pushing limits and challenging those around them. It is a natural response to brain development. The brain growth lets them view the world in new ways. The new perspectives lead them to ask knew questions and to wonder if that limit is really a limit, or if it can be bent. As with any living system there is variation, but these challenging periods are approximately 3-6 months out of every twelve. I try to keep this in mind when one child is driving me crazy while another is a delight. In a few months they’ll probably have swapped spots.

Last Fall I had three kids hit “challenging” all at once. It was something of a perfect storm and about all I could do was batten down the hatches and hope to navigate through. We all survived. Life has settled down quite a lot for both Kiki and Link. Gleek is still struggling. In fact the level of challenge seems to be increasing rather than tapering off. Which has me laying in bed at night and worrying that maybe the last four months have actually been the calm ones. I hope not. I really hope not. Because I don’t want to have to deal with harder. I don’t want Gleek to have to deal with harder, she already feels lost, caught, and lonely.

Two months ago I decided to have Gleek write in her journal before bed. The idea was to give her a tool to sort through her tangled emotions. It was a great idea and it worked for about 3 days. After that she started writing Mad Libs in her journal and then she lost interest completely. I shrugged and let it go. I knew we could always pick it up again if necessary. I think I’m standing in the middle of necessary. Gleek needs something. I know she needs something. But I also know that whatever it is that she needs, I can’t be the one to build it for her. She needs to find her own strength that she can carry with her rather than having to flee to me as her only support.

This independence from me is something that I am working on with all of my kids. My natural reaction to problems, particularly those of loved ones, is to stretch myself to fix it. This sometimes solves the problems, but it leaves me plugging the leak with with my finger. Eventually I run out of fingers and there are still leaks to be plugged. Since last fall I’ve been focusing on helping my kids build structures for their lives where I am a useful support, but where they do their own maintenance. I’m attempting to teach them how to man their own leaks. They don’t like it much. It was much more convenient to them for me to plug the leaks. But until they stand there themselves long enough to get thoroughly tired of plugging leaks, they don’t understand why everyone is much happier if leaks are prevented rather than plugged. Long term this is better, short term it is exhausting.

This is the net with which Gleek and I managed to catch a better day yesterday. I’m glad it worked the way we hoped.

As for everything else, today is Friday. I’ll think about it later.

Yesterday was a bad day for Gleek. It was an epically bad day. It was a day which resulted in a calm down time in the principal’s office, a visit to the time out room, a phone call home, and her teacher walking out to the car to speak with me for a few minutes when I came to pick Gleek up from school. She was not naughty, but she reacted to each small problem with an overflow of emotion that the staff at the school worked hard to help her manage. Since she has been generally doing well in school, we’re all pretty certain that yesterday was a random rogue wave in her sea of emotion, rather than the front edge of a hurricane. But we’ve got folks on the watch towers just in case.

One of the hardest parts about emotional break downs in public, is going back out into public where the people who witnessed your break down can see you again. Since hiding in our house forever is not a good option, I knew that Gleek needed to go back to school today. I also knew that I needed to do everything in my power to make today go well. The only thing harder than going back after a break down is going back after two break downs.

The first thing I did was to let Gleek sleep in late while I got the other kids off to school. Then it was Howard, Gleek, and I in a quiet house. There was space for me to focus just on her and for her to feel calm. I also cooked a breakfast that was heavy on complex carbs and proteins. Endurance food. I sat with her while she ate. In part this was to ensure that she did in fact eat, but it also provided us a chance to talk. I could listen to her random thoughts and use them to form a picture of how her life has been at school lately. The answer is “not easy.” She struggles with teasing, jealousy, and frustrations. There are also things that she enjoys. I carefully stored all the information so I can sort through it later when I am deciding what long term changes may need to be made.

It became apparent to me that Gleek needed to take something with her to school. She needed a symbol, a tactile reminder of how she plans to make today different than yesterday. It could not be a toy, since the presence of a toy was part of yesterday’s upsets. We decided to fix her hair into a style rather than her usual wild tangle. Gleek selected a style in which lots of little ponytails divide and rejoin to create and attractive net over the top of her head. It is an extremely controlled hair style. She too wants today to be in calm contrast to the usual wildness.

So I begin gathering hair and dividing it into little ponytails. Gleek sits quietly and makes plans for how she is going to handle the day. She rehearses how she is going to return a carrot shaped eraser to another child. It belongs to him, but she loved it so much that it came home with her. Now she will return it and apologize. I hear her plans and I worry that the other child will not be gracious about the return. She wants to make amends, but I don’t know if he does. So I focus on the net and hope we can catch enough calmness in it to help her today.

There is a story, I can’t remember now if I read it or invented it, about a Native American weaver who whispered stories into the threads of her blankets to guide the dreams of those who slept under them. I don’t exactly whisper to the strands of hair, but each band added carries the hope that today will contain confidence and calm. That Gleek’s teacher will see when she runs fast and wild, it is really herself she is trying to escape. That people will see when Gleek shows anger she is really feeling lost, alone, or hurt. That this beautiful, amazing, strong, little person can believe in her own strength and beauty.

I know this is a lot to ask of a hair style, but it is all I can give her today. She must brave school alone. She must face the peers who saw her out of control yesterday. I can not go with her. The success does not belong to her unless I am absent.

When all is ready, I drive her to school and walk her to class. She seems happy. She is happy much of the time, but this happy seems calm rather than urgent. I think the sleeping, talking, eating, and weaving worked the necessary magic to launch her into a much better day. I stand at the door of her classroom and watch for a moment as she drops the carrot eraser on to a boy’s desk and then goes to speak with her teacher. The teacher’s eyes meet mine for a moment and I give her a fraction of a nod. I can now climb off my watch tower and rest for awhile. Someone else is on duty until school is out.

I really hope Gleek has a better day.

A duck sails smoothly across the pond, but under the water it is all a mad chaos of paddling. What we see does not always match the experience. Sometimes an aching arm indicates a larger posture problem rather than an arm problem. All of this is particularly true when dealing with psychology, particularly the psychology of children. Children are not very self-aware. The don’t spend time reasoning out their motivations. They think, they feel, they act. But a more accurate way to state it is: They think, they feel, they think, they feel, they feel, they think, and then they react upon the thoughts and emotions at the beginning of the chain. When asked why, a child can’t often tell you. They rarely know why.

Part of my job as a parent is to be a psychologist. I watch for the odd reactions and indications that the child is feeling stress. When I see the indicators, I then have to sleuth out the causes. Patch keeps getting out of bed and claiming he is hungry, but he had a good dinner. Is he worried about his make-up work? Does he need someone to listen while he talks? Is there an assignment at school he dreads? While I’m at it, I should also figure out why he’s been deliberately provoking Gleek. Is he jealous of her? Did she ignore his game suggestion? Is he mad at a friend and taking it out on his sister because he knows she’ll love him anyway?

Often the sleuthing is straightforward. Most of the time the answers do not matter all that much. But other times, it matters a lot. Children do not break down into major tantrums because they enjoy it. When a normally resilient and happy child has a major meltdown, something else is going on. The something else may be as simple as illness or hunger, but it needs attention.

It seems like the majority of this year has been about Kiki and Link with a side order of Gleek. This week Gleek and Patch have claimed center stage. I suspect the stress of having me busy with LTUE helped trigger the various meltdowns, but the causes were in place before that. I’m still sorting it out. I’m still sleuthing to find the motivations.

I am also still wearing my talent wrangler hat and as a result I’ve taken over some more business manager stuff.

Bottom line: Today was tiring. I’m hoping I’ve slogged through most of it so that tomorrow can be more restful.

It was one of those days when I doubt every parenting decision I have ever made. I’d scolded the kids into getting ready for school, just like I had scolded them into bed the night before. I drove them before me with my words, herding them into being in their assigned places before time ran out. It was not how I wanted to interact with my children. It was not how I wanted the pattern of our lives to go. But that’s how it was that morning, and the school drop off was accomplished.

Back at home I sat down to read my list of blogs and was unexpectedly stabbed right in the guilt. A woman I admire spoke of how she perceives many other moms as being at war with their own kids. Is that me? I wondered. I don’t want to be at war with my children, but the morning and the night before had certainly felt like a battlefield. I looked at my own behavior and I did not like what I saw. How could things be different? Why was it so stressful?. The tension was created by the looming deadline. I had to get them to sleep, so that I could get them up, so that they could be to school on time. Without the deadline I could let them get up on their own schedule. Conflict would be reduced.

There is a type of home schooling called unschooling. The theory behind it is that children are naturally curious. They are interested in new things all the time. The unschooling parent’s job is to provide materials and help for the children to pursue their own interests. Because the children are never forced to learn things that they are not interested in, they remain excited about learning and eventually they get around to learning all the educational skills they will need.

I love the idea of unschooling. I love the basic trust in the amazing nature of children. I’ve seen how it can work. My son Link did not learn to ride a bike for a long time. All my efforts and stress and worry did not overcome his fear. As he passed his 8th & 9th birthdays, I began to fret that he would be teased by his peers. But the spring when he was 10, Link just got onto the bike and rode. If I had just trusted him to get to it, I could have saved all that stress.

On the other hand, I remember that same Link at age two and a half. He was enrolled in an early intervention program because he was not talking. More than just not talking, he was not even understanding most of what was said to him. He did not even have the concept that pointing was a good way to indicate things that he wanted. I remember sitting with him in class. I had a cup with a black dot on the side. I dropped an M&M into the cup. Link wanted that M&M, but had no clue what I expected of him. I took his little finger and touched it to the black dot. Then tipped the candy into his hand. It did not take many repetitions before the concept of pointing clicked in his head. A whole new world opened up to him. Both our lives got easier because he was able to point out the things that he wanted.

Would Link eventually have learned how to point on his own without me taking his hand and forcing it to touch the cup? Perhaps he would have. Perhaps I should have just trusted that he would get there on his own. But leaving him to muddle through on his own when I could see something that would make his life better felt wrong. That experience taught me that sometimes my job as a parent means that I must require my kids to do things that they see no use for. When I do, I get to witness the moment when suddenly they get it. Their world becomes a larger place and new possibilities are opened to them.

Two days prior to the day when I scolded my kids off to school I was listening to a friend of mine. She was talking about her children and how September is the saddest month of the year because they go off to school. She loves having them home and misses them when they are gone. I looked around and other parents were nodding. Yes. Everyone silently agreed. This is how good parents feel about their children. My problem is that I don’t feel that way. I love my children, but I am glad to send them off to school. I am a happier, calmer person when I have regularly scheduled time alone. That way when they are at home I can give them more focused attention. It makes sense. I know there are other parents who feel the same way that I do. But I can’t help feeling that wanting your kids home all the time is a better way to be. It is a better message to the kids to say “I want you with me” than to say “I need to be away from you.”

I suppose the result is the same for both me and my friend. Our kids all go to school, but I’m happy about it while she is grieved. Neither of us debates the need for kids to be apart from us. There are lessons that kids can not learn if mom is standing right there. I tell myself that by sending them to school I am giving them the chance to stand on their own and to be strong. I treasure my quiet spaces in the day and try to make it up to my kids when they are here. Yet part of me worries that the home schoolers and unschoolers are more right than I am. That they are valuing their children more than I do by devoting themselves more thoroughly to guiding their children’s education.

On the afternoon of the scolding day I did my best to pay attention to each child. I handed out snacks, and listened to chatter, and mediated conflicts. Most of the conflicts included Gleek who is high energy and is working through some tangled up emotions right now. I watched her and remembered that I wanted to find a class as a useful outlet for some of that energy. She loves bouncing around and she loves music, so a dance class seemed logical. But the typical glam jazz or ballet class is not right for her. She isn’t a pink sort of a girl. Her favorite clothes are black. She needed something a little more quirky.

I went online to search for alternatives to jazz and ballet. The offerings were limited. I found an Irish Step class that met 30 minutes drive to the north. I also found an African Dance class that met 30 minutes drive to the south. Either one could be a very good thing for her. I stared at my screen, trying to figure out how I could make one of the classes work with everything else in our schedule. I tried to figure out whether the two hours per week strain would be worth the benefit for my child. Would it be an amazing turning point for her? Would it give her a focus that would make everything else easier? More likely it would become another scheduled deadline that I would have to herd everyone into meeting. Or it would be something we felt guilty about missing.

I stood up and stretched. I’d spent 40 minutes on the dance class search. During those forty minutes Gleek had come to ask things of me twice and been turned away. She had no idea I was looking up stuff for her. It was just mom on the computer again, so she had to get her own drink of milk. It struck me. Instead of spending the time looking up dance classes, what if I turned on music and danced with my daughter? What if I took those thirty minutes I’d spend driving her to and from lessons and instead gave that time to her at home?

In theory a class gives me a break while teaching skills to my child. The reality is that by the time I drive home from dropping the kid off I only have about 20 minutes before it is time to go back and retrieve the child. That space in the middle is not long enough to do anything but wait. The skills Gleek learns in a beginning dance class are ones that I am perfectly capable of teaching.

It was a beautiful epiphany. I could picture my daughter and I laughing and dancing with joy in a weekly shared hour. Unfortunately the vision foundered upon reality. I am already over scheduled and stretched to my limits. What happens when the dance time coincides with an older child’s homework crisis? What about the day when I’m so tired I’m ready to sit down and cry? Is the answer really to expect more of myself? I expect too much of me already.

I stepped away from my computer and looked down the stairs to where my kids were romping in the family room. I thought again about trusting my kids. Are all my efforts to parent perfectly a lack of trust that they’ll learn their own things at their own speed? Do they really need all the classes, and stressing, and running around that I do, or am I just sucking the joy out of our lives by pushing when I should be waiting? Is it my responsibility as a parent to decide what’s best and guide them through it? Do I give them space or draw them close?

At bedtime on the scolding day, I spoke with Gleek. She had a thing she was confused about. It was one of those issues where the answers are not clear cut. I told her that it was a topic which still confused me and so all I could offer were my thoughts without any real answers. Gleek’s eyes got wide and she said: “But I depend on you to tell me what’s right!”

Yes child. So do I. I expect myself to know all the answers. But I don’t. No one can. The best we can do is muddle through and make decisions based on the information we have.

My head is full of dissonances about parenting. It is hard. It is even harder when I see people I admire make different choices than I do. Then I doubt myself and I long for the ability to do things over. I can see the value in lots of opposing theories. I see value in both unschooling and in pushing; in keeping children close to home and in sending them out to grow; in scheduling lessons and in leaving time unstructured. All of these things can be either good or bad for a particular child. In fact they can change from one to the other as the child grows. The best I can do is try to quiet the noise in my head and feel my way forward one step at a time.

This is the second day in a row I’ve ended up weary and tearful over my kids. I don’t know how to help them. I don’t even know if I should be helping them or if I should be standing back and letting experience be a stern teacher instead. The issues aren’t major ones, just homework and kid squabbles. I fear major issues since these small ones hammer me so hard.

This is as much a part of my parenting experience as the happy days which are full of fun stories. It is an important data point for all those considering parenting or in the midst of their own parenting. I know that I’m good at parenting, or so Howard tells me. Some days I even believe him. But other days I feel like a failure.

Then I comfort myself with the quote from Mary Radmacher:

Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day which says “I will try again tomorrow.”

Edited to add: It is now thirty minutes later and things are much better. They always do get better, it is just hard to remember when in the midst of it all.

Problem:
Gleek often reacts without thinking. Sadness and loneliness get expressed as contrariness and anger. As a result Gleek commonly discovers that she has just done a mildly bad thing and wishes she had not done it. This leads her to feel bad about herself.

Analysis:
Much of her impulsive bad choices are driven by tangled up feelings that she carries inside without sorting through. I need to give her tools for sorting through her feelings. In past years I’ve tried to make space to be her emotional sounding board, but what she really needs is something that does not depend upon me being available. She has lately shown an interest in journal writing.

Solution Attempt to address the issue: Each night before she reads in bed, I’m going to have her write a journal entry. She can write down all her feelings both positive and negative. Then when I come to tuck her in for the night, she can tell me about what she wrote.

Results so far: We’re two days in. The journal was filling up with angsty sadness. I was concerned that re-reading all the sadness would convince her that her life really is horrible, so I have added the requirement that each entry should have at least one happy thing in it. Her days really do have more happiness than sadness. I’m not sure whether the codicil is necessary. Writing the emotions down seems to allow her to let go of them. She is much calmer after writing a lament.

Additional plans: I need to enroll her in either dance or gymnastics. She needs to have something in her life on which she can focus surplus energy.